


A Spread of Cards

by Edonohana



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Bloodplay, Clothed Sex, Dream Sex, Elements of dubcon, Fight Sex, Hand Jobs, Hate Sex, M/M, Tarot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-04 04:30:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16339853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: The man in black never tires of fucking with Roland.





	A Spread of Cards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



The man in black sets down a deck of cards amongst the scattered bones of the golgotha. “Seven cards. Always seven. Seven for the days we count, seven for the tales we live, seven for a secret never to be told. But I’ll tell _you_ , gunslinger.”

“Seven,” says Roland slowly. “Not… not nineteen?”

He doesn’t know where that number came from, but it seems to mean something to the man in black. His head whips up sharply, and for the first time there is honest shock in his mocking eyes. Then the laughing scorn is back. Forced back, perhaps. 

“Nineteen is a spread for the end of days. And we’re not there yet. Not quite. A little closer, perhaps.” He lays down the first card with the practiced flick of a gambler, a clever cheat. “Ten of sheaves. You, gunslinger. Not yet. But soon.”

The card shows a man bent almost double beneath his burden of ten sheaves of rice. One sheaf is split and sharp. It cuts into him, drawing blood from head to back. If he cannot straighten beneath the weight, it looks like to split him in two.

“Burdens. Weariness. Pressure,” says the man in black, unnecessarily; Roland knows not the cards, but he can see as much in the picture alone. “A mind divided.”

“I am of one mind.” The gunslinger knows that to be the truth, both his strength and his weakness. He has been called singleminded in both praise and anger. Relentless. Obsessed. Did he not let the boy ( _Jake, his name was Jake_ ) fall to his death in pursuit of his singular, unshakable purpose?

The man in black laughs, long and shrill, before turning over the next card. It’s upside down, making it even harder to comprehend. Some strange machine, long and pink as a worm, floats in the air above a blasted desolation.

“The Chariot, reversed. Self-doubt. Confusion. Still so sure you’re of one mind, forever true and unwavering?”

The gunslinger says nothing, waiting for the next card. It shows boys walking along a snowy road, exhausted and staggering, two holding each other up. A house whose five round windows glow invitingly gold lies before them, but its door is chained shut. 

“Five of coins. Hard, grim times. A long road to walk.” 

A man sits in a bed with his head in his hands, as if he just woke up from a nightmare. Both his legs are broken. Nine swords hang over his head, suspended by slim ribbons striped black and red.

“Nine of swords. Guilt.” The man in black clicks his tongue. “Not a good spread so far." Over-dramatic, he declaims, "Can there be any way out?”

The next card is laid out upside down, so Roland has to crane to see it. A great ship is trapped in a sea of ice, its bow cracking under the pressure. The men aboard seem antlike, tiny dark figures in a vast snowscape. As the gunslinger looks at the card, he begins to discern some other presence beyond the ship, white against white, amorphous, malevolent. Perhaps it is only the effect of mentally reversing the picture. Or perhaps not. He quickly looks away.

“The Ship, reversed. Forward motion. Fate defied. Hope.” The man in black shoots Roland a sly glance. “There are other worlds than these.” 

He does not rise to the bait. “Get on with it.”

“Strength." The man in black smiles. "And the meaning is as pretty as the lady. Success in endeavors. Temptation resisted. Illness cured. Injury healed.”

But Roland is captured by the image rather than its explication. A young woman with hair the mellow gold of afternoon sunlight holds open the jaws of some mutant beast, a hideous blend of cat and crab. 

“Susan,” he breathes, and reaches out to touch her hand. 

The creature’s jaws snap shut. Roland recoils with a yell of shock and pain. Blood gushes from his maimed right hand, spattering over the severed fingers that the beast, though still a flat and painted image, is somehow pulling into the card. Bones crack as it chews…

…and then the pain is gone. There is no blood. His hand is intact. The beast is nothing more than a picture, and the woman holding its mouth open bears no more resemblance to Susan than the color of her hair.

“I’ll have no more of your sorcerous tricks,” says Roland, or tries to say. No words emerge from his mouth. When he attempts to stand, he cannot. He is caught like a bit of meat in an aspic, unable to do anything but watch as the man in black lays out the final card. 

It shows a pair of figures entwined in an obscene embrace. But no, they are only wrestling. If Roland could move his head, he’d be able to see more clearly. Are they clothed in tight garments the color of their skin, or are they naked? Male or female? 

“The Lovers, which some call the Rivals. A choice that affects a relationship. Save the boy or let him fall? Shoot the man who comes to your camp in the night or call out for him to speak his name?” The man in black pushes the card closer. “Are they fighting? Are they fucking? It’s your choice.”

Unable to blink, his vision swims. The figures become a boy embracing a girl with hair the color of corn, a cloaked magician bending a woman like a willow tree, a man in denim struggling with a man in black. Roland is falling, falling, and a man catches him, a man with a shrill laugh and brilliant eyes. They wrestle together in a fever heat, bodies rubbing together, biting, kicking, elbowing. Hands now striking, now seizing, now touching in a rough caress. His jeans have come unbuttoned. The robe is open and there’s nothing underneath but a body like any man’s, hard scarred muscle at the chest, the belly softer and unmarked, and the parts below both hard and soft, their skin still fine and delicate. 

“I like it better wet,” says the man in black, breathless but still jeering. And there’s blood pooling in Roland’s cupped palm, gushing from the stumps of his two fingers gone. There’s no pain, but that only makes the loss even more sickening and incomprehensible. 

“I don’t use that hand to jerk—” he starts to say, absurdly, but the man in black grabs it and pulls it down, curling his remaining fingers, wet and slick, around himself, up and down in a familiar motion even if it’s with the wrong hand. 

“A choice that affects a relationship,” whispers the man in black as he closes his own hand tight. "Choose, Roland."

Roland wants to say that he already made his choice, but the man in black refused to be killed. This fight-fuck was none of his choosing. But he chased the man in black so long, it feels wrong to let him go now that he has him at last. He moves against him angrily, squeezing hard enough that he hopes it hurts. The man in black does the same, and it does hurt, but there’s pleasure in it too, a harsh satisfaction like a maddening itch scratched until it bleeds.

 

Roland awakes alone in the golgotha, his right hand aching. When he raises it, half-afraid to look, he finds it whole but subtly changed: the skin thinner, the veins and tendons more prominent. He has aged. 

The gray ash and white bone dust are marked by the crisp outlines of seven cards. He rolls on to his belly for a closer look. As he blinks, his eyes still sticky and unfocused, he sees the edges overlaid again and again: not seven cards, but seven sevens, a hundred sevens, a thousand sevens, a seven for every grain of sand on a beach. And then his living breath goes out, and blows it all to a wisp of smoke that hovers in the air, and is gone.


End file.
